Coinbase’s New Asset Listing Process

This article is official Coinbase statement, and was previously published at medium.com.

Our goal is to rapidly list all assets that meet our standards and are compliant with local law, while providing our customers with the tools to discover, evaluate, trade, and use digital assets.

Coinbase was founded to give anyone — no matter where they live — trustworthy and secure access to a more open, blockchain-based financial system.

Towards this end, we’ve always taken a deliberate approach to adding support for new assets to the platform. We currently support Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, and Litecoin, and we have announced that we are exploring the addition of several new assets. However, there are now thousands of digital assets of all types, including coins, tokens, forks, stablecoins, and collectibles. One of our top customer requests is to add support for these new assets, and we have been determining how to do this in a secure and compliant way for those assets meeting our standards.

Today we’re announcing a new process that will allow us to rapidly list most digital assets that are compliant with local law, by satisfying listing requests in a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction manner. In practice, this means some new assets listed on our platform may only be available to customers in select jurisdictions for a period of time.

The new process begins with a form for issuers to submit assets for listing at Coinbase, which we will evaluate against our digital asset framework. The application form and the digital asset framework will be regularly updated, and our form will indicate the latest version of the framework we are evaluating against.

Initially there will be no application fee. Depending on the volume of submissions, we reserve the right to impose an application fee in the future to defray the legal and operational costs associated with evaluating and listing new assets. At our discretion, we may choose to list some assets on the basis of our own evaluation, even in the absence of an application. In other cases, we will attempt to give quick, specific reasons for the approval or rejection of particular assets.

With this shift in process, our customers can expect us to list most assets over time that meet our standards. Because listing announcements will become more frequent, we expect to publicly announce the addition of new assets only at or near the time of public launch across one or more Coinbase products. While this is a change from our earlier process of pre-announcing far in advance, we will still announce early enough to allow for sufficient liquidity on our exchange and an orderly market bootup process. We will also begin communicating with a wide variety of asset developers and ecosystem participants. As always, all employees of Coinbase will continue to be subject to trading restrictions and confidentiality obligations to ensure the integrity of our platform.

Finally, in addition to adding more assets to the platform, we will augment our tools and educational materials to help customers learn about assets in order to make their own decisions.

We think of Coinbase as the global bridge from fiat to crypto, from the fragmented financial system of today to the open financial system of the future. We believe this new listing process allows us to quickly add assets while remaining compliant with local law and continuing to offer our customers the safe, high-quality experience they have come to expect from Coinbase.

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